october diptych

I know it's November, it sneaked up on me...but technically I have been working on this diptych all of October. I chose the sketch to interpret in October and it has percolating in my head since then, just did not have the opportunity to get into the physical till this morning. So glad it happened this morning though, because it turned out exactly as I wanted it to despite the fact that I wasn't sure how I was going to proceed when I started. By now some of you might know that I work intuitively and this diptych is the perfect example of it.I started off like I always do by sizing and cropping my sketch in Photoshop. This eventually goes on the back of my diptych as a handy reference of what the inspiration was, but it is also handy to look at it in the correct scale as I plan my approach. Usually the next step is painting my canvases with a base color. But I could not decide what it should be, so I left them blank. I knew I wanted to thread sketch my figure and it occurred to me that I could print it on the stabilizer sheets to use as a guide. I decided to pin them on top of my white cotton sheeting and picked out thread to machine sketch with and thread to embroider with later. Here's the thread sketching with black cotton thread and gray rayon thread. I then tore away most of the stabilizer. I decided not to torture myself with removing all the stabilizer, especially since I liked how the small pieces left over were giving a shadow effect. At this point I also decided to change my approach entirely... I flipped the two quilt sandwiches over and trimmed away most of the batting. Then I trimmed away the excess white fabric and that's when the diptych told me what color I needed to paint the canvas boards.I sponge painted the edges with silver metallic and black acrylic paint, trying to achieve a charcoal look. I was not worried about the center as I knew it would get covered up entirely. I decided not to wait for the paint to dry, added matte medium to the back of my sketches and glued them on the canvases. Then I dug into my recyclables stash and came up with a black plastic mesh bag and black tulle. I tore and ripped and glued little pieces to my hearts content. This part was way more fun then I thought it would be. I really liked the brush stroke like effect that the pieces produced and that I was able to keep the look of the spontaneity and the quickness of the initial sketch. I must admit I did work pretty quick on the whole thing! The longest and most painful part was waiting for the matte medium to dry so I can scan the diptych in for the final jpeg. Tell me what you think!